Gardening With Skills

I mentioned in a previous post that my gardening arch-nemesis lives in my neighborhood and I'm forced to drive past his very successful garden several times a day while shuttling my son to and from preschool. His long lustrous plants taunt me with their green vibrant leaves. I seethe when I see them heavy with fruit. I get so angry when I see our pit of death and I have just driven past his personal Eden. His garden debunks my theory that we just have bad soil around here.

I was driving past it today and The Gardener himself was out there planting new tomato plants. I waved. He waved. Then I slammed on the brakes. I pulled into his driveway, did a three-point turn and drove back up to his garden. I got out and walked over to him.

"Hi. I live just down there (pointing) and I have a garden too - everything I have is dead or dying. How are your plants still alive?" I say to him.

Turns out he's a very nice guy and we talked for quite awhile. His problem is that he's got so much okra that he can barely harvest it all each day. Some problem. Hmph. His plants are growing so well that he can barely reach the top to pluck the vegetables from them. Double Hmph.

Well he is now my Gardening Mr. Miyagi and I will be his Katie-san. I asked him as many questions as I could about what he's doing right and what he thinks I'm doing wrong. He thinks we should get our soil tested, put Miracle Grow down when we plant new plants, put 1 tablespoon of Liquid Miracle Grow in a jug with 1 gallon of water and fertilize with that once a week, and avoid other fertilizers since some plants are sensitive to them.

I have decided I will do exactly what he does. He was rolling out some black landscaping fabric and cutting holes where his tomato plants will go and then mulching over that. Yes, I should do that too. He's growing tomatoes and okra. I will grow tomatoes and okra. I don't even like okra, but I have plans to grow it.

I'll admit that while he was talking my mind wandered a bit and I did contemplate quickly knocking him down with his hoe, wrapping him in black landscaping fabric and dragging him back to our garden where I'd make him stay until he creates magic in our yard too. But he was a really nice guy and the boys were in the car, so I didn't follow through with that abduction scenario.

Instead I will periodically stop by his garden and steal his plants…er, I mean… pick his brain and see how much advice I can soak in. I need to develop some gardening skills if I'm going to get something to grow. This guy seems like he's got more mad skills than he knows what to do with - I'm an empty vessel in the gardening skills department. We're perfect for each other. I wonder if he knows this?

Cyril called for Backup

You may remember Cyril the garden gnome. I had an entire post about him with links to all sorts of Gnome Liberation groups and a week after I posted it, it disappeared from this blog altogether. I wonder if the evil Gnome Liberators infiltrated Blogger and deleted it. Regardless, our lucky garden gnome, Cyril, has obviously found himself in over his head with our failing garden. Apparently he called for backup.

My friend Dianne, who lives in Key West and operates a Pub Crawl business with her husband, came up here to visit recently. Thanks to Tropical Storm Fay, we didn't get to actually see each other, but she was kind enough to leave a bag full of presents for us, the kids and the pets. She's good like that. Dianne is full of interesting tidbits and recently told me something I found fascinating. She told me that in Key West mosquito control trucks are currently blasting out dragonfly larvae to help control mosquitoes. The dragonfly larvae eat mosquito larvae and then grow into adult dragonflies. And as we all learned recently, adult dragonflies eat adult mosquitos. Isn't that an eco-friendly way of getting rid of mosquitos? Much better than filling the air with pesticides.

Back to the bag of gifts...When I opened up the bag this happy little garden gnome was peaking up at me. He's a fancier gnome than poor old Cyril and he comes complete with a dangling birdhouse and a red bird. He must mean business because he has gardening tools in his pocket.

I waited a week or so before the garden dried out enough to introduce our new gnome to the garden. I put him next to the row of pumpkins since I feel like those need the most luck at this point. He's firmly planted in his new home, so we'll see if this gnome brings us more luck. He still needs a name though...

Eat the Bloody Worms!

I recently had a bit of a disaster cooking up some lettuce for the tadpoles. You're supposed to boil the lettuce for 10 to 15 minutes before serving it to tadpoles. I'm not sure if it's to make it more tender for them or to wash away any pesticides that might be on it since tadpoles are very susceptible to toxins, but every site says to boil it, so we boil it. I put the lettuce in and about an hour later Farmer B asked me what had died in a pot on the stove. It actually turns into this weird translucent material that goes right through a sieve if you leave it there that long.

I was feeling guilty about this the other day when I was at PetsMart and I remembered reading that tadpoles like bloodworms. The idea of this didn't appeal to me but I thought I should take a look at the bloodworms to see how bad they were. Turns out they're frozen into little red cubes about the size of a dice. They come in a sheet of foil and you just punch a cube of bloodworms out when you need one, like popping out a cold pill from a foil pack. I thought I could handle that, so I spent about $4 and bought a pack. Then we drove to Chuck E Cheese for a rare treat for the boys…until I remembered that I had a frozen sheet of bloodworms in the car. I couldn't bare the thought of them defrosting in the car so I put them in my purse and spent an hour chasing the boys around Chuck E Cheese with a purse-full of frozen bloody worms. ((shudder))

The boys are definitely intrigued with them. The name "bloodworm" just appeals to kids. I have zero interest in researching bloodworms to find out about them because I know I couldn’t handle it. When we got home, I cut a cube in half and dropped both pieces into opposite ends of the tadpoles' little watery home. Don't forget that we have "tannic" water, which explains the color of the water in the box. It was pretty gross because as the cubes start to defrost in the water, little red worms start to fall away from the cube and then the whole mess of worms falls to the bottom. I have a worm phobia so this was really vile to me. Then the tadpoles started to devour these frosty little things like piranhas on a carcass.
The tadpoles really liked them from the looks of it and two even got into a little fight over one - kind of reminded me of a very gross tadpole version of the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp.

So now a nightly discussion in the house is whether we boil up some lettuce or defrost some bloody worms.

I'm convinced if our garden had grown I would NOT be doing this.

The one about the Hoe with the Weed and the Glasses

I took the boys to play outside in the yard today for the first time since before TS Fay showed up - about a month now. The ground was squishy and had that unmistakable rotting mud smell that you get in a Florida swamp, but the ground was firm enough that the boys could play. I took the opportunity to grab the hoe and go to town on all the new weeds in our garden. People who say weeding is gratifying aren't standing in a bug-filled bog when it's 94 degrees in the shade. But I'm still clinging to the pathetic hope that something will grow in this garden and I figured that all the grass and weeds sprouting up can't be helping things.

I kept my two junior gardeners on the other side of the garden fence for fear they'd mistake one of the sad little plants clinging to life for a weed and pull it out. So I hopped in the garden and the boys played in the yard and periodically stopped to peer through the garden fence. I'm shuffling about hoeing and raking when Aidan leans into the fence and yells, "Hey mommy! Your glasses!" I turned around and sticking out of the ground between two limp pumpkin plants was indeed a well-worn mud-covered pair of expensive reading glasses.


This is funny because right before TS Fay hit I went into the garden to take pictures. When I got out there I noticed that I was wearing my reading glasses, so I slid them on the top of my head (you know that special place where old people often wear their glasses while complaining that they can't find their glasses). I can't take pictures while wearing my glasses so putting them on my head made more sense to me than coming all the way back inside. Next thing I know I felt them slide off the back of my head and then heard a little thud. I reached up and felt my head. No glasses. I looked at the dirt. No glasses. Had I imagined myself bringing the glasses out? Didn't I just feel them slide off? Was I going crazy? I searched and searched. I walked around in circles, but I didn't find them. I was starting to question my sanity - and so was Farmer B after I relayed the story to him.

Farmer B strode out to the garden to get them since he felt I must be crazy for saying they fell off my head and instantly not being able to find them. But 10 minutes later he came in and said "No glasses - you must not have brought them out there."

So my spare pair of glasses was lost. I felt sure they were in the garden, but since I couldn’t find them, I didn't know what to think. It seemed impossible that they could disappear in an instant. But disappear they did.

Oddly enough a similar thing happened once before. Way back at a previous job - about 7 years ago - I lost my glasses while sitting at my desk. I had them on and next thing you know they were gone. Not on the desk. Not on the floor. Just gone. I spent a week not being able to see the computer or any written documents so I sucked it up and went to Lens Crafters and spent $350 to get an identical pair of glasses. The day I showed up with my new glasses at work, I accidentally dropped a business card down the back of my desk. When I reached back to get it, I saw my missing glasses hanging on a cable behind my desk. So now you know why I have two pairs of identical glasses.

Or I should say "had" two pairs of glasses.

Yeah, I really can't make this stuff up.

After the rain: Final Verdict

I've been carrying on about what TS Fay did to our already failing garden, but now it's time to belly up and show some pictures. It wasn't pretty before, but the saddest part for me is that we had beautiful green bean plants, pumpkins, sunflowers and peanuts starting. They were the only plants that were a nice shade of green and actually looked promising. Now even they don't look so hot.

I think I've figured out why we have so many beautiful dragonflies in the garden. Did you know they eat mosquitoes? Yup. They usually eat other flying insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes. The fact that I can't even go out in the garden to weed without being overrun by blood-sucking biting mosquitoes makes me welcome the dragonflies.Back to the plants. Fay's flooding killed off the rest of the tomatoes that were clinging to life. They are just brown sticks now. I do have one tomato plant in a cage that is still managing to grow, but it's not a pretty shade of green at all.
Oddly there are nice green tufts on the carrots, so I'm still wondering if they'll grow into anything. Is it allowed to annoy me that I accidentally planted the carrots out of season and they are the greenest thing in the garden right now? The peanuts look all right, although they aren't great - the sunflowers have yellowed and are drooping. I hold out hope that a few may pull through.

The pumpkins are the worst part for me. They were so green and leafy and promising. Now they look just plain sad. I'm clinging to hope that at least one will pull through. Here's the before and after pictures of my best pumpkin plant.

Before
AfterI did learn something new about pumpkins thanks to a highly credible source on gardening: the Halloween issue of Highlights magazine. They did an article on a little girl who grew a monster pumpkin that won a biggest pumpkin competition in California at 948 lbs. Apparently this little girl has more mad skills than I do. "Amber" says that the best way to get a pumpkin to grow better and bigger is to bury the vines as they grow. She carried buckets of dirt from other parts of the garden and scooped soil around each leaf joint. If the vine stays buried, a new root grows down from each leaf joint and sucks up extra water and nutrients for the pumpkin. She says that the big leaves are like waterspouts that channel water right to the root. I'd like to bring that little girl down here and watch her try to grow a one-pound pumpkin in our death dirt and then I'd send a hurricane or two her way and see how she rolls. Hmph.

Oh, I also read a very interesting pumpkin fact - a giant pumpkin can gain 25 lbs in one day. Fascinating. Not that I'll ever need this tidbit, but I liked it nonetheless.

So there you have it. The best pumpkin advice I've read so far. Highlights magazine. Go figure.

Organicool

This is the first in my new Organicool series. This will be my forum to showcase some fun ways to live a more eco-friendly life. It was inspired by three things:

1) My garden is a temporary washout due to T.S. Fay, so I have to find another way to satisfy my blog while we wait for the soil to dry out enough to replant.
2) I love sharing new and fun eco-friendly ideas with anyone who'll listen - or read.
3) My 4-year-old always grocery shops with me and when I point out that there's an organic alternative for something, he'll say "Organic? Cooool" but it always runs together into "organicool" so it's become a silly phrase for us.

So look for some fun and unique eco-friendly concepts…but they won't all necessarily be 100% organic. If it's green and earth-friendly I'm game.


Organicool - Chicken Feather Diapers

I ran across this odd idea recently and found it humorous and intriguing. Apparently the USDA has found a way to make diapers out of chicken feathers. We are cloth diaper users, but I'm intrigued by the idea of making disposable diapers without all the oil and toxins, and instead using a product that is normally discarded into landfills.

The scientist behind it is called Walter Schmidt and he's a chemist with the Agricultural Research Service. At ARS' Environmental Chemistry Lab in Beltsville, Maryland, Schmidt's job is to study the size, shape and chemical properties of all kinds of substances and materials. Doing this with chicken feathers has led Schmidt to find valuable new ways to recycle the feathers.

Each year, more than 2 billion pounds of feathers are produced by the U.S. poultry industry, enough to fill more than a billion pillowcases. Figuring out what to do with all those feathers can be a real headache. Most farmers throw them away, or they grind them up and mix them into animal feed to add protein to animal diets.

But Schmidt, as an environmental chemist, is always looking for ways to benefit the environment, such as by keeping mountains of feathers out of landfills.

Schmidt put a feather under a powerful electron microscope to get a close look at each piece or "barb" of a feather on a quill. What others see as feather, Schmidt sees as keratin fiber. Keratin is the same type of fiber found in wool. It gives wool clothes the ability to keep dry even in the rain. The keratin fibers in feathers are shorter and finer than those in wool, but just as strong. Keratin fibers in chicken feathers are much stronger and more absorbent than wood fibers--called plant cellulose. Keratin also breaks down in landfills much faster than plastic.

Schmidt has tinkered with chicken feather fibers to make other things. Just a few of these are dyed paper, cloth, paper plant pots, boats, canoes, insulation in homes and air filters for buildings and cars (including dashboards and door panels).

Schmidt says the feather fibers can come from any bird. But commercial chickens have built-in color control: they're bred to always have the same white feathers.

This technology is still in the development stage, but it's a very cool idea to me. I know the world won't switch to cloth like we did, but maybe if disposable diapers come from a better source and degraded quicker, they might not be so bad for the environment. Maybe Aidan's "Guess what? Chicken butt" shirt will be the new in-thing for babies? - in a new literal sense...

If you doubt my sanity with this, here is a NY Times article about the chicken feather diapers. It's an old article, so I'd love to know what's happened recently with this.

And here is a TreeHugger article on some students making fabric from chicken feathers

Spackle Frog and the 'Poles

We're still recovering from Tropical Storm Fay and part of our recovery involves Farmer B scoping the outside of the house for cracks in the stucco. The "experts" on TV said that most of the minor house flooding in Central FL caused by T.S. Fay was from rain coming in through cracks in the stucco of people's homes. So with three more tropical systems in the Atlantic heading westward, ever-responsible Farmer B decided that all of our stucco cracks must be filled immediately with stucco spackle. He'd been out there awhile when he came in and told me that a tree frog was sitting in one of the stucco cracks and that he couldn’t figure out how to get him out. I told him to just pull him out and toss him in the swampy grass where he could hop off and find another home. Farmer B agreed and went back outside.

Then he came in again and said that it worked and that the frog was free and he spackled over the crack. But then another frog poked his head out - a spackle-covered frog. Apparently there were two frogs in there. So I grabbed my wellies and a yellow bucket and ran outside to de-spackle the frog. Farmer B managed to pull it out and into the bucket and then tossed the bucket to me. The poor thing was covered in spackle - white gooey sticky spackle. I don't have any pictures of this because my first instinct was to wash him off and not grab the camera.

I washed him off and let him sit in a little puddle of water in the bucket for a few minutes to help clean off his skin.

He was not hopping especially fast when I put him on the ground to stretch his spackle-covered legs, so hopefully he was just a bit scared.

I managed to completely de-spackle him and rinse him off and he looked good as new. I hope he recovers and finds his froggy friend from the crack-home they enjoyed before the spackle-incident.

On a tadpole note, we have moved the tadpoles into a large Styrofoam cooler. I am aware of how eco-unfriendly that sounds, but the cooler contained some food products that came in the mail as a birthday present for Farmer B, so at least we're finding a way to reuse the Styrofoam box, right? The water the tadpoles were swimming in was very dark water. In Florida we have tannic water - this refers to darkened water dyed from the tannin in local leaves. It's clean enough water, but looks a bit murky and is perfect for gators. I filled up a few inches of the cooler with tap water and then left it in the sun for 24 hours so that all the chlorine and other toxins in the water would evaporate into the air from the sun's heat. Then I dumped the bucket of tadpoles in their tannic water into the clear water of the Styrofoam container… so they'd still have some of their own familiar water.

We've been feeding them boiled lettuce and they seem to love it. I read online that tadpoles love lettuce, so that's what we're sticking with for now. We don't have any rocks or "land" in the container yet because none of the tadpoles have sprouted legs so far.

Oh and yesterday - Labor Day - I made it out to the garden to see how things have recovered now that the soil is starting to dry out. It ain't pretty. More to come.